But most are, 2 says, because they just don’t have to think about race on a daily basis.

Sigh. One can see what they’re getting at, of course, and it’s not that there’s no truth to it, but jeezis what a way to go about it, with what ineffable smugness, and yet again this eagerness to attack feminism in particular.

Also, what about middle class? Why is cis a category while middle class is not? What about young and attractive? Both presenters are young and attractive – what about Young Attractive Feminism? Why are we attacking White Feminism for excluding anyone who’s not white, cis and straight, but not attacking Young Attractive Feminism for excluding anyone who’s not young and attractive?

But they are kind and reassuring, once they’ve educated us. “Being a white feminist doesn’t make you a bad person,” Presenter 1 tells us, “it just means you have a lot to learn.”

Presenter 2 gets the closing line: “The most important thing any white feminist can do is educate herself, and listen, and engage with the experiences of women of color, without silencing them. Because sometimes as white ladies we just have to shut the fuck up.”

26 Responses to “Huffington Post “White Feminism””

You’re so fortunate to have these youngsters like this to teach you, Ophelia. So very, very fortunate. I bet that you had no idea that women of color have different experiences than White Women™ before you saw this video!

What are the odds that the white presenter considers herself a Good Ally?

And from what I can glean from comments on feminist blogs, not all White Feminists are feminists who are white. Women of colour report in comments sections that they are shouted down on the basis that while they themselves are not white, their feminism is identified as White Feminism. So basically if a woman of colour is inconveniently gender critical or sex-indistry critical, liberal feminist white ladies don’t have to intersectionally shut the fuck up and listen to their sister of colour after all, because she is actually a White Feminist. (The other time intersectionality doesn’t apply and white ladies don’t need to listed to women of colour is when they are ‘out of touch’ aka ‘old’.)

I’ve only seen this in comments sections so far, I can’t recall an article/post that discusses this that I can link to. However, I suspect this kind of behaviour is only going to become more common in the near future, so there will likely be plenty of opportunities for observation of same.

There are lots of things which I find irritating – in the video, but of course not only, as the phenomenon is far, far broader than the White Feminism issue. Smugness connected with the patronizing “educational” approach (yes, scare quotes. It’s always about “educating” someone, never about having a conversation, isn’t it?), banalities stated with the air of profundity, the whole “we are not silencing you, but shut up” approach, the triumphant youth – well, yes.

Still…

Sure, they are young, but in memorable words of Sef Sermak “it is a fault that most people are guilty of at some period of their life”. That they want to define themselves in opposition to (what seems to them) older, well-entrenched versions of feminism? Surprise, surprise: what the hell should be the reference point of young feminists, if not that?

I gather that it’s probably more about how they do it. So, how about the choice of “white” (instead of ‘young’ or ‘attractive’ or ‘middle class’) for a battle cry? Actually, I do not receive it as particularly vexing. There is one simple answer which I find rather convincing: in practice you just *can’t* take all the aspects into account. You need some focus; otherwise you will end up with a general “let’s be intersectional” or “let’s be good to each other”, which makes for shitty campains. (Just to be sure: I consider it a completely trivial observation. Nothing profound here.) In effect, ‘why white?’ doesn’t sound to me like a proper question to ask. “And why not?” is better.

[Sorry, as I said at the start, I found the video quite irritating. For exactly this reason, I prefer to be cautious with the criticism.]

Agreed. Feminism is about women and women’s issues…. no matter the race of the women in question. It’s about the consequences, experiences, obstacles and ramifications of being a women in a world largely dominated by men.

Race issues are a different domain characterized by an entirely different set of problems.

it used to be the province of men to nicely drag each other down in the mud in order to establish some sort of social ranking and achieve status

Hmm, I thought that both men and women have been pretty efficient in this type of sport from the time immemorial. A province of men? Seriously?

John #6: I may be wrong, but I don’t think that Ophelia was rejecting intersectionality as such (together with sensitivity to special problems faced by particular social groups). At least, I didn’t read her words in this way.

I’m pretty sure it’s called that as the antonym of Black Feminism, which started in reaction to sexism in the Civil Rights movement and racism in the feminist movement. Black Feminist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality.

Black feminists objected to things like feminist demands for the right to work outside the home, when most black women were forced to work outside the home to survive, and demands for access to birth control, when black women were being subjected to forced sterilization. Describing pregnancy and homemaking as the plight of “women” made it clear that the only women being considered were white women.

At the time, GLBTQ issues weren’t at the forefront–although I haven’t dug into the literature to see, I imagine that trans issues weren’t on the radar at all, and black and white feminists alike exhibited plenty of homophobia. In any case, straight cis black women are still the second largest group of feminists in the U.S. after straight cis white women.

Erica, to my mind, it’s more of a reaction to the increasingly loud and widely accepted claim that young people have figured out everything that’s ever been wrong with feminism and activism. If you were to go back a few years, on this blog and others, I think you’d find there’s a lot of optimistic discussion about young activists.

It’s not “young people” that are “the problem.” It’s the current vogue among young leftist activists to trash everything that happened before them, even things they’re not actually aware of and don’t actually understand.

15 years ago I was among the young activist set. I’m not so far removed that I’ve become a different person who doesn’t recognize the value of fresh voices. But with some time behind me I’ve come to see the limitations of a young person’s perspective, in much the same way I then saw the limitations of an older person’s perspective.

And while it might seem to you that people are saying “listen to their elders,” I don’t think that’s what’s going on. You won’t see Ophelia, for example, saying any such thing. Don’t forget that she and lots of us here have enormous praise for young activists like Malala Yousafi.

What you’re seeing, I think, is a quite understandable reaction to the most prominent and vocal set of young activists. Not because they’re young. Because they think that their youth itself qualifies them to “see” all the bad, wrong things that everyone else is doing because they’re old and out of touch. It’s arrogant, and it’s anti-intellectual. Many of the younger activists are simply wrong. Factually wrong because they’re ignorant of recent history.

I’m reminded of an argument between my sister and my uncle about whether being gay wrong. I’ll let you assume who had which position. Eventually, my uncle shouldn’t say anything except that my sister was too young and inexperienced to have a valid opinion, and he assured her that one day she’d agree with him. Do you realize how frustrating that is?

Of course that’s frustrating! It’s happened to all of us. It’s happened to me so, so many times. That’s just ugly behavior.

That’s not the character of every conversation about younger and older perspectives, though. Not everyone talking about this is a condescending bigot. Really. There are important issues here that exist outside of our personal irritations at our obnoxious older relatives.

The people who are talking here, on this blog, are not someone’s bigoted uncle. That’s a really unfair comparison. There’s a huge line between bigotry masquerading as elder wisdom, and genuine, good-faith disagreements on political tactics. The latter is what’s happening here.

There’s a duty to recognize that. It’s not OK to layer your personal (and justified) disgust at people like your uncle onto conversations that are far less ugly and a lot more nuanced. Though you don’t mean to, what you said is frankly fucking insulting. And it’s exactly the sort of age stereotyping that you’re asking other people, rightly, not to do to you.

“The most important thing any white feminist can do is educate herself, and listen, and engage with the experiences of women of color, without silencing them. Because sometimes as white ladies we just have to shut the fuck up.”

So it’s an educative effort toward intersectionnality that considers a feminist must be refered to as she/her?

I cannot be a feminist if I’m male? Maybe they should take feminism 101 first?

What the actual gosh (as these young people say nowadays) can you read, Erica? (Note, this is not an attack on your youthfulness or lack of same, a topic about which I know bugger all, but an attack on your reading comprehension skills – remedial reader exclusionary, that’s me.)

Yes, MrFancyPants – and now you – have painted this as a youth versus age issue. Ariel’s comment is clearly saying that youth isn’t the issue. And my comment was actually using a rhetorical technique whereby the words convey (well, such is the intention) the opposite of their literal meaning. You see, I don’t actually have a lawn with young people on it. It may have been a bit too subtle.

My demographic is not my karass. Pomposity and profundity are found in all age groups; insight and understanding doesn’t belong to any generation.

Presenter 2 gets the closing line: “The most important thing any white feminist can do is educate herself, and listen, and engage with the experiences of women of color, without silencing them. Because sometimes as white ladies we just have to shut the fuck up.”

If that’s “intersectionality,” I say the hell with it.

Which is so objectionable — self-education? listening? engaging women of color? shutting up sometimes in order to listen to other people?

“One can see what they’re getting at” — then why be so contemptuous? Why take it as an attack on feminism rather than engagement with feminism? They are concerned about something that is serious and important — race is much more impactful on one’s life than attractiveness, for starters. That young people are energetic and self-righteous is to be expected, why are older people increasing the polarization rather than reaching out and increasing common ground?

I’m an old too, and I also get annoyed by young people, but it’s important to focus on what is actually important and be open to listening, and not give in to the pleasures of dismissing anyone who is not parroting our party line. We have enemies. It’s not annoying girls bubbling about intersectionality.

In the opening words, one of the speakers says: “Because white people don’t have think about things like race on a daily basis”.

Yes, that did rather strike me as well. While race relations are far from perfect in my country, we do have a robust ongoing multi-threaded dialogue here. In my personal, political and professional lives I have to consider race literally every day. Sometimes I think it would be nice if I didn’t have to. That would require either living in the perfect world or being smugly oblivious. I don’t live in the perfect world (just a very privileged corner of an imperfect world) and I don’t want to be smugly oblivious again.